I got shocked and opened the article, but I correctly attributed the image credit to the “Flickr” website + User. I thought this is fine for the image credit, but what this person did was, she approached me and told me that this image belongs to her (the one she created) and she wanted to have a backlink to her own website, not via Flickr.

After some conversations, I thought it’s her own image, she took time to create it and if I want to use this on my website, then I should credit it where she wants me to credit it. Fair enough. I gave her a ‘dofollow’ backlink to her website.

This ended there. But, I was kinda surprised by seeing her approach and request for the backlink. It’s definitely just a simple email, but it triggered my attention and ended as a backlink.

I decided to try this on my own and see how it works. There is a term for this and it’s called “Image reclamation”.

If you have the habit of creating your own images, let it be screenshots, modified pictures, infographics, etc. What you can do is, you can upload them on portals like Flickr, Imgur, or even on your own websites. I love watching movies and I take plenty of screenshots to use for my website articles.

Being a curious cat, I opened a popular article on MoviesDrop, downloaded a few images and used Google Image Reverse Search for them.

I saw 2-3 websites using those images and giving image credit to moviesdrop.com, it felt good, like, I got a few backlinks for this. But, I saw another website, which used our image, but didn’t give proper credit. I was confused whether I should do something or not, but I just simply messaged them on Twitter and told them that they used the image (they found on my website) for their article, so a linkback (credit) will be appreciated. I shared the example of websites already doing this. They didn’t take this seriously, but a second message from me got their attention and they decided to give the backlink via image credit. This is how it looks now. :’)